Pencil Sketch Effect

Friends.. In this tutorial I will tell you how to easily convert an image into a pencil sketch with Photoshop. I’ll be using Photoshop CS5 throughout this tutorial but the steps apply to any recent version of Photoshop.

1. Open an Image in Photoshop : Go to ‘File‘ and then select ‘Open‘ (or press Ctrl+O), a panel will open and you can browse your image from your system drive. As you can see, I have taken an Image of Bollywood actress.

2. Now right-click on this layer named ‘Background’ and select ‘Duplicate Layer…‘

4. Now select another layer named ‘ Background’ and do the same. Go to ‘Image‘ and select ‘Adjustments‘ then select ‘Desaturate‘ . ‘Background’ layer is desaturated now. Now you can see that Both the images are desaturated now.

5. Now select ‘Layer 1’ and Go to ‘Image‘ menu at the top of the screen, select ‘Adjustments‘, then select ‘Invert‘ (or press Ctrl+I while selecting this layer). ‘Layer 1’ layer is inverted now. or in our case the brightness values, making light areas dark and dark areas light, leaving us with a photo negative effect.

Picture will look like this..

6. While selecting this inverted layer, Go to top of the Layers panel, you’ll find the Blend Mode option. Click on the word Normal, which opens a list of layer blend modes, and choose ‘Color Dodge‘ from the list.

The Image will temporarily appear filled with white. Depending on your image, there may be some areas of black here and there, but for the most part it will be filled with white like this :

7. In this step we will actually create Sketch effect. Go to ‘Filter‘ menu at the top and select ‘Blur‘ then select ‘Gaussian Blur‘.

8. This opens the Gaussian Blur filter’s dialog box. We create the sketch effect by blurring the layer. We will slide the Radius slider to apply a slight amount of blur. The more blurring will be applied and the more intense the sketch effect will become. I will set my Radius value to 80 pixels.

Image will look like this :

9. To give it more effect we will Go to tool box and select ‘Burn‘ tool.

10. While holding right-click we will apply this tool on our Image and it will be darkening like it’s burning. And we will get picture like this.